We may be more intelligent. It depends on whether you're willing to believe that certain phases of society has a eugenic effect on intelligence. For example, i

We may be more intelligent. It depends on whether you're willing to believe that certain phases of society has a eugenic effect on intelligence. For example, in the medieval era, the upper classes has more surviving children than the lower classes. Without any economic growth (because the economy was tied to land, not capital or innovation, and thus the size of the economy was basically fixed), this creates a constant flow of downward social mobility, where the ten children of a wealthy couple must compete with each other to be among the two who get to inherit their parents' slot in society. If you think that intelligence could improve someone's chance of rising to the top of such a society, and staying there, then yes, you'd logically think that people in the past were dumber. Evolution is slow when creating new features. But evolution is very fast when it's just changing the proportions of existing features. It's not hard to see how the above trend would cause a 2 point IQ gain per century, which would mean 10 points in 500 years. There's a big difference between 90 and 100 IQ.